The grim, dark 4X gets a fifth race.

Every Warhammer fan’s favorite army of biological horrors is coming to Warhammer 40,000: Gladius—Relics of War this week, releasing on January 15th. Tyranids are a swarm of devouring monsters, and play like them, with unique mechanics catered to that theme. Tyranids will apparently build up and expand by stripping biomass from their enemies, their own units, and the environment itself. Tyranid cities will strip their surroundings bare of resources. It sounds like an interesting, mobile play style focused on sprawling and adapting to the situation rather than digging in and building up defenses. They also don’t use the same resources as others, using a flexible biomass pool to build up rather than food and ore.

Gladius is a 4X strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. At release, our Tom Senior called it “a solidly made strategy game, but a bland one” where most of the races didn’t have too much to differentiate them from one another aside from unity variety. You can read his review here. We’ll see if the Tyranids’ new mechanics can shake that up—you can read a post from the game’s developers here for more details.